I read a popsci book about music + neurology once, and basically the only thing I remember from it was this exact sentiment. Singing and dancing are basic human functions! You don’t have to be good at it! You are allowed to sing! You are allowed to dance! You are allowed to have fun singing and dancing! Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, including yourself!

And I think this applies to creative acts in general, even those that require more than just your own body. You don’t have to measure up to some arbitrary standard in order to have fun singing, or dancing, or drawing, or writing, or whatever! Humans are fundamentally creative, expressive creatures! Embrace it!

people love to make sprite-based games to evoke an aesthetic with no attention paid to the sprite sheet size or color palette limitations that created that aesthetic. people love to make shit with voxels and I hate voxels. when are people going to start making maquettes or 3d models and rendering them as sprites again

I think a lot about how so much of art-making (and creative work in general) is about limitations and restrictions. Even the medium you choose imposes constraints on your work. And those constraints can lead you to more interesting forms of expression, and more interesting results!

And then you get the thing @spookydichotomy is talking about where an aesthetic born out of a specific set of constraints takes on a life of its own. And people start imitating the aesthetic, but without as many limitations.

And sometimes, doing that sucks the life-force out of the original aesthetic like some kind of style vampire, surviving on pure nostalgia. But other times, it leads to new, exciting mutations of the original idea, that turn an old Cool Thing into a new Cool Thing that can stand on it's own!

So I guess the question is, what is it that gives you the second thing instead of the first thing? Where is the magic?